Making Recovery USB Flash Drive

[kayessen38]

I have new HP Z book17 G3 mobile workstation with Windows 7 Professional Installed purchased directly from HP Canada. The computer does not have a DVD/CD Drive. 

I need to make a recovery media and HP Recovery Disc.  My understanding is that I can either choose DVD or USB flash drive. Following instructions given on Page 50 of the user guide and going to HP Recovery Disc Creator, I find that the drop down menu only lists DVD and not USB drive.

Can you help me? Thank You

[WAWood]

@kayessen38

My suggestion is you consider using a third-party solution known as Macrium Reflect (MR).

I prefer to use third-party recovery solutions for the following reasons:
1) More flexibility and reliabilty -- can make recovery media as often as you like, not restricted to one attempt, which if it fails, then you are stuck.
2) More media options -- can create media in DVD, USB stick, or external drive format
3) Mounting option -- can "mount" the save images as virtual "drives" and extract individual files and folders
4) WinPE boot option -- can install a special boot option that allows you to boot to recovery information and do a repair or restore from there -- when Windows will not boot

What I recommend is the following:
1) Download and install Macrium Reflect (MR) from here: http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx
2) Run MR and choose the option: "Create an image of the partition(s) required to backup and restore Windows" to write a full backup to an external drive, USB stick, or DVDs
3) Use the option to create a boot USB stick or CD

My experience is that MR, when using the High Compression option, typically can compress the saved image file to about 50% of the USED space in the OS partition. This means if you have an 80GB OS partition, and 40GB is used, MR only needs about 20GB to store the image file.

I use this all the time and it typically takes less than 15 minutes to do the image backup and about the same time or less to do a restore. Plus, MR has the option to Add a Recovery Boot Menu entry. This allows you then to boot into WinPE, and you can then use that to do a restore -- when you can't boot into Windows!

NOW, you have the means to restore a full working system from the external drive, USB or DVDs stick in only a few minutes.

Good Luck

[urlieinApril]

Hi,

If you insist to create a recovery media on usb flash drive, besides the the above suggested macrium, you can try aomei backupper standard(free) version to create a bootable media. To create a Windows 7 bootable media is the same steps as Windows 10, check the following link:

http://www.backup-utility.com/windows-10/create-windows-10-recovery-disk-4348.html

[CherylG]

To make a USB Recovery use the HP Cloud Recovery Download Tool:

https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c05115630